Cookies from Stockholm
SCIENCE
Last week the Swedish Academy of Sciences gave a good imitation of an arch housewife who, having made her family believe they would get nothing but pork & beans for supper, bounces beaming out of the kitchen with a big, beautiful platter of cookies. Three weeks ago the Academy, which awards Nobel Prizes in science, bestowed the 1938 and 1939 prizes in Physiology & Medicine on Corneille Heymans of Belgium and Gerhard Domagk of Germany, gave newshawks to believe that no more awards would be forthcoming this year. Apparently the Academy changed its mind. For last week it announced four more prizewinners in science.*
The 1938 award in Chemistry (deferred from last year) went to Professor Richard Kuhn of Berlin, who isolated Vitamin B2 (also called lactoflavin or riboflavin). The 1939 award in Chemistry was divided between Professor Adolf Butenandt, also of Berlin, and Professor Leopold Ruzicka of Zurich. Butenandt isolated the male sex hormone, androsterone, and Ruzicka first synthesized it from the fat of sheep's wool.
Since Adolf Hitler forbids Germans to accept Nobel Prizes, Domagk has already politely refused to take the prize money (TIME, Nov. 6). Kuhn and Butenandt will probably do the same, unless they want to perform the scientific experiment of living in a concentration camp.
The 1939 prize for Physics was awarded to a U. S. scientist who has long been due for it--jovial, 38-year-old Ernest Orlando Lawrence of the University of California. About a decade ago Lawrence invented the cyclotron, most efficient and powerful of atom-smashing devices, which spirals atomic bullets up to tremendous speeds by repeated electrical pushes. With his 85-ton cyclotron Lawrence and his numerous co-workers have created scores of artificially radioactive substances, including common salt, and have even created a few atoms of gold. He now has a 225-ton cyclotron and is planning an even bigger machine, that will weigh 2,000 tons (TIME, Nov. 6). Dozens of cyclotrons are now in use all over the world, and many are in charge of physicists who got their first cyclotron training under Lawrence at Berkeley.
Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who last week joined twelve U. S. colleagues* in the highest honor a scientist can receive, is idolized by the men who work with him. When he heard the news, his first thought was of them: "It goes without saying that it is the laboratory that is honored. I share this honor with my coworkers, past and present."
* For the 1939 Literature prize, see p. 56. *This includes those born in the U. S. or established in the U. S. when they received their awards.
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